


lend a hand (my heart's full of love)

by amusewithaview



Series: Nothing but love in view [10]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Companionable Snark, F/M, Snarky Tony, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-01
Updated: 2014-08-01
Packaged: 2018-02-11 06:41:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2057796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amusewithaview/pseuds/amusewithaview
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy has always been willing to help out (especially in the name of SCIENCE!) but this is pushing it.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>(A "What if?" spin-off from the main continuity of "Nothing but love in view.")</p>
            </blockquote>





	lend a hand (my heart's full of love)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rainne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rainne/gifts).



> ALL YOUR CORNY TITLES ARE BELONG TO ME.
> 
> So, Rainne was having a bad day and requested fluff since she knows the next thing I plan to post is SAD. I had parts of this tucked away in a drawer, so, here! Have Darcy and Tony and MLP: Friendship is Magic references!
> 
> *Edit: HEY REMEMBER THAT TIME I FORGOT THE SUMMARY BECAUSE I'M A DUMBASS? ME TOO.

When Tony came into the lab gesticulating wildly with a _big silver arm_ , it was…well, it was a Tuesday. Usually the arm was red and/or gold, but Stark and weird pseudo-prosthetics went together like Philly steak and Cheese Whiz. Darcy paid less attention to whatever he was going on about and more to the shiny thing. It was shiny, and interesting, and became even _more_ fascinating when it suddenly twitched, thrashed, and appeared to be attempting to strangle Tony.

Darcy dashed over and grabbed it, yanking at the fingers and (she’s later told by an amused Tony) whispering, “Let him go, Thing, let him go! Yes, _there’s_ a good Thing, we don’t strangle the nice scientists!”

The newly christened _Thing_ went limp again, and then Darcy had her arms full of…arm.

“The fuck is this?” she asked, looking down at it. “The failiest prototype ever?”

“Not mine,” Tony declared immediately, because he was nothing if not an utterly _shameless_ self-promoter, “and not a prototype, this is the real deal, a fully-functional weapon.” He considered it, or possibly her boobs, for a moment before smiling brightly, “I can do better. I _will_ do better.”

“Okay…awesome. Why am I still holding the weapon that _just attacked you?_ ”

“It hasn’t attacked _you_ yet,” he pointed out. “Maybe it likes you!”

“Stop bothering my intern!” Jane shouted from somewhere in the lab.

“Not your intern anymore!” Darcy shouted back. “And it’s not like I’m _busy_ right now,” she muttered under her breath. When she looked back, Tony’s grin had gotten even bigger which meant, “You heard that, didn’t you?”

He nodded.

“You want me to carry the fail-arm for you, don’t you?”

“Knew you were a sharp one, Lewis, follow me!”

Darcy trailed after the inventor with a glum look on her face, mostly for show. Tony’s lab was about 100x more interesting than Jane’s, of course, things were also about 100x more likely to explode or try to kill her in there. Win some, lose some. She followed him over to a new station over by the wall, looking at the body schematics he had all over the place and slowly putting two and two together.

“Tony?”

“Hmm?” he was looking at a blueprint, expanding some bits and trashing others.

“Am I holding _the Winter Soldier’s assassin arm?_ ”

“All of him is an assassin, not just the arm.”

“ _Tony._ ”

“Technically yes, but I’m pretty sure I’ve disabled most of its self-protection and maintenance subroutines.”

“ _Pretty sure?_ ”

“Well, it went after _me_. Seems okay with you, though. Might be a body temperature thing, or maybe it’s reacting to my tech. Not sure.”

“…I’m putting it down.”

“Not there! _Or_ there. Darcy!”

“Pick a place or I’m dropping it, so help me, Stark…”

“Okay, okay,” he shoved aside a stack of mismatched, half-finished _something_ to clear a space. “Alright, does _this_ work, princess?”

“Yup.” She slowly lowered the arm to the table, just _waiting_ for it suddenly grab her neck or her wrist, like that freaky Hand-of-Glory thing from Harry Potter. It didn’t even twitch, though. She still took three _big_ steps back once it was down. “We done?”

“What? Oh, yeah, for now. Might borrow you a bit for some of the beta-testing.”

“Tony, I _have_ two arms already, how am I supposed to help test this?”

“I’ll hook you up to the brain monitors and you can think things at it. Make it move, snap its fingers, flip the bird, all the necessary things. Totally within your range of abilities, I promise.”

“Why can’t _you_ do these things?” she asked pointedly.

Tony grimaced, “Doesn’t work when I am both tester and test-subject at the same time. That way leads to bruises, and then lectures, and really – who wants that? Besides, you’re bored over there in the space lab, come join the bot lab! We have cookies!” He paused, “Actually, don’t eat the cookies: DUM-E made them, not really sure what’s in there.”

It _was_ sort of a tempting offer, still, she had to ask: “Why isn’t the Winter Soldier helping you make the arm? Doesn’t it have to be all,” she twirled her finger beside her ear, “calibrated to his brain waves or something?”

The look Tony was giving her was the same look _she_ gave to dogs that tried to play with their shadows.

Darcy rolled her eyes, “Fine, _yes_ , I will help you.”

So began a very strange time in Darcy’s life. For the next few weeks she spent at least one hour of each day hanging out in Stark’s lab, hooked up to this machine or that, sometimes moving her own arms, sometimes moving the metal one. There was a series of metal arms, actually, each built along similar lines, but for slightly different purposes.

Tony seemed to expect Darcy to recognize each of them, which led to a few problems when he said things like: “Grab model B-27, I need to work on joint movement.”

And Darcy responded with an eloquent, “What?”

She got sick of it, so after the first week, she brought in a full Roy G. Biv of nail polish and decorated all the prototypes. Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. The _next_ time Tony said something about grabbing B-27, she was happy to ask: “Do you mean Rainbow or Thundercloud arm?”

Tony paused, thrown for a loop, “What?”

Darcy pointed.

His face went through a myriad of expressions as he studied her handiwork, before settling on amused. “When Barnes comes down and sees those, I’m gonna tell him it was _you_ ,” he told her. “I’m not taking the fall for your artistic sensibilities – wait, is that _Pinkie Pie?!_ ”

“…it might be. Of course, to anyone not in the know it’s just a chubby pink horse.”

Tony grimaced, “I can’t decide if that’ll make it better, or worse. Either way? _Your_ fault.”

The next day when she came in, each of her pieces of arm-art had been bedazzled. Just a little.

Darcy raised an eyebrow at the scientist, “Still all my fault?”

He shrugged, “You started it.”

One week later, they were working on fine motor control (which mostly involved Darcy trying not to get a headache while she used B-62 – Rarity – to paint her nails) when Barnes made an appearance, the first time he’d come in while Darcy was there. Between Jane and Tony, it was a miracle that Darcy was managing anything resembling normal sleep schedule.

“Barnes meet boobs, Darcy meet Mr. Freeze. Are the introductions out of the way? Fabulous! So, here’s what we’ve been working on,” Tony said, steering the Winter Soldier over to one of the projection tables.

Darcy shrugged and went on painting her nails. Tomorrow she was planning on adding little lightning strikes, but today she only had a short time in the lab, so she was just prepping the background with gradients of blue ranging from sky on her pinkies to midnight on her thumbs. She loved this job.

It was the first time she’d seen Barnes up close. He was pretty hot for someone who’d been repeatedly freeze-dried. He’d cut his hair since ‘finding himself’ – and Captain America – so he was pretty much back to his WW2 appearance. Darcy wondered if it would be possible to get a copy of his old uniform to _really_ recreate the look, before scrapping the idea as probably too painful for either of the soldiers.

She covertly checked out the Winter Soldier’s silhouette, telling herself that it was a good exercise in mental gymnastics, since it meant she couldn’t watch what the arm was doing while it painted her nails. He had that nice triangle shape going, not as exaggerated as Captain America’s, not really a fair comparison since his was practically god-level (she’d compared the Cap to Thor), and really well muscled arms.

Well, _arm._

He was wearing one of the simpler prosthetics, one with a decent gripping ability, but –

“If he can’t play _Flight of the Bumblebee_ one-handed, I’m doing something wrong,” Tony had said. “And I don’t do things wrong.”

She went back to her nails after a minute. There was only so much ogling you could do while your ogle-target remained stationary. After another minute or so she felt a prickling on the back of her neck. She looked up to find Barnes on the other side of the table from her, looking at the MLP she’d painted onto it in her best _Sinful_ shades. Rarity’s sides were bedazzled with tiny gems that she _really hoped_ weren’t _actual_ diamonds, but you never knew with Stark.

Barnes reached out, almost as if he was about to touch the design, and then backed off, gave her a brief nod, and left.

“Not much of a talker, is he?” Darcy said.

“Yeah,” Tony muttered, something about the way he said it had her looking more closely at him. He was staring at the door Barnes had just used, a speculative look on his face. Abruptly, he shook his head, and then came over to scrutinize her nails. “Lightning bolts? Why not miniature arc reactors?”

“They’re _my_ nails, Tony.”

He stalked back to his table. “Your nails are making poor life choices!”

If Darcy had known _then_ that that visit would mark the advent of a _routine_ , she would not have chanced fucking up her nails to get more ogle in. She had all the ogle she could want, all the ogle she could handle (for the record, that was _quite a bit_ , thanks much), because the Winter Soldier had decided that he wanted to come visit his arms _every stinking day._ It wouldn’t bother her so much, except he never _said_ anything, just stalked around her station and made faces at her nail polish arm-doodles. The plainer ones got an eye roll, some of the cartoons got a glare, but only the unicorns earned a _sneer_.

No appreciation for art, apparently.

He barely even spoke to _Tony_ , not that the scientist seemed bothered by it.

Darcy tried not to let it get her down, but after a solid week of the stalk-stalk-glare-at-doodle routine she was sick and tired of it. The next day, when he came down, she waited until he’d made his customary journey around the tables to glare at the doodle on the arm she was working with that day (B-15, Twilight Sparkle pre-wings, her _favorite_ ) and then she _let him have it_.

“Okay, what the hell is your problem with unicorns? I mean, you seem to have a really weirdly-specific hate-on for all cartoon animals, but _unicorns?_ They’re all sweetness and light! What the hell’s wrong with you?”

He slowly looked from the doodle to her, and smiled. The smile was big and bright and full of white teeth that made his eyes seem even bluer. It was the very first smile she’d ever seen on his face and _holy fucking shit_ , it was a panty-dropper. The Winter Soldier had a panty-dropping smile. _Nobody told her that_ , she _was not prepared to deal with Bucky Barnes’ panty-dropping smile_.

“I thought you were gonna keep me waiting forever,” he said.

Back the truck up. What?! If Darcy's brain had had a visual representation, it would have been the error 404 page. _The Winter Soldier?_ She pinched her own arm, forgetting she was hooked up to the prosthetic, so she got a _double_ pinch, _ow_.

“TOOK YOU LONG ENOUGH,” Tony shouted gleefully. “I almost lost the pool!”

“ _Shut up, Tony,_ ” Darcy and Bucky said simultaneously, never once taking their eyes off each other.

“Do you actually hate unicorns?”

“Dunno, never met one,” he shrugged, smirking at her

Darcy stared at him realization slowly dawning. “It was a front? It was all a front? You’re _not_ really a grumpy, scowly jerk who hates unicorns and fun and possibly goes around kicking puppies in his spare time?”

He rounded the table and stopped beside her, forcing her to look up at him, which was convenient when he started slowly unsticking the little contact-wires from her forehead in order to disconnect her from the arm.

“You,” she poked him in the side (muscles, all muscles), “are a _troll._ ”

Bucky – it didn’t feel right to refer to her soulmate by their last name – nodded, “Good thing you’ve got a long fuse.”

Darcy narrowed her eyes at him. “I save _that_ fuse for _strangers._ ”

He took her hand and pulled her to her feet, studying her. “I’m not a stranger?”

“Not for long, not if I have anything to say about it,” she told him, hiding nerves behind bravado.

Bucky took her hand and lifted it, pressing a kiss to her knuckles that shivered up her arm and all the way down to her toes. “Sounds like a solid plan to me.”

“Aaaand _done_ ,” Tony said, _totally breaking the mood_. “Car’s coming round to take you two crazy kids wherever you want to go. Go on, get out of my lab. You’re stinking up my science with all your hormones.”

“Hot dog stands and a walk in the park?” Darcy asked.

“You read my mind, doll.”

**Author's Note:**

> I know I overuse the "doll" thing, but to quote Icona Pop: I DON'T CARE, I LOVE IT.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [are you the one? (yep, that was me)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2059584) by [ErisDea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErisDea/pseuds/ErisDea)




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